Every scholar has a dream; and for those working on Giordano Bruno, surely among the most coveted is to have at their disposal the Bruno holdings of the Warburg Institute Library. Today, thanks to the collaboration of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Bruniani ‘Giovanni Aquilecchia’ dell’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici and the Warburg Institute, this dream is becoming a reality with the inauguration of the ‘Bibliotheca Bruniana Electronica’.

What better way, then, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the ‘Seminari Bruniani’, which since 1998 have taken place in the second week of June at the Warburg Institute. These meetings have enabled more than 100 funded students from various continents to engage with internationally renowned scholars and to consult the shelves on the 3rd floor of the Institute’s Library dedicated to works by and about Bruno. This new collaborative project further strengthens the long-standing relationship between the Warburg Institute and the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici established by E. H. Gombrich, D. P. Walker, Charles B. Schmitt, J. B. Trapp and Nicholas Mann together with Gerardo Marotta.

From June 2007 the ‘Bibliotheca Bruniana Electronica’ can be consulted on the sites of the two institutes responsible for its creation:http://www.giordanobruno.it/

This collection includes the standard 19th-century editions of the complete Italian and Latin works of Bruno, the most important biographies, as well as a large number of rare pamphlets and offprints. Only those works currently protected by copyrights will not be available.

While each text can be consulted online or downloaded as individual PDF files they are not searchable by keyword, such a facility already exists (see Links page above). Our intention here is to provide material for reading, building blocks for the new portable libraries of the 21st century where thousands of pages can now be transported in the comfort of a memory stick.

Bruno himself – speaking of his experience as a philosopher who criss-crossed the whole of Europe in order to preserve his freedom – wrote that ‘for the true philosopher, every land is home’. Very much in the same spirit, we hope that this ‘Bibliotheca Bruniana’ will not only promote studies and research on ‘il Nolano’ but also serve as a modest contribution towards the construction of a space, transcending geographic and linguistic barriers, for an international community of readers able to find their true home in classic texts and in libraries.